Daniel's Stuff

Month: January 2011

I have several PIC18F452 in the PLCC package, so I decided to see if I could get that working.

My forth is running on it and I am implementing a new UI for the clock allowing the time to be set using a really cool dial/switch combo.

To connect to the new board I’ve made another daughter board that has the power connector, quadrature dial button thingy and a serial connection plug. I have made a little RS232 adapter using a MAX232 chip and a hand full of capacitors placed into a DB9 head shell with some pins sticking out of one end and a DB9 on the other. When I plug the adapter into my Funky Clock it is powered from the Funky Clock and I am able to send code and commands to it via a terminal emulator 🙂

Unless you’ve been living under a rock recently you’ll know that the Playstation 3 is now wide open for home brew code. I’ve been having some fun running my own code on my PS3 🙂 The PSL1GHT wiki contains all the information necessary to set up a development environment.

I had another one of the LED arrays around the place and decided to see if I could drive it directly from the PIC port pins. It seems I can, and the results are much better than my much more complicated previous setup. Of course it uses up almost all of the PIC18F4550’s port pins. All of port A, B, D and E 😉

The thing I was really happy about was that the code I had written for the old hardware needed very little changes to work. Forth is really good like that. All I had to do was change the low level code that actually hits the hardware, and the higher level stuff just worked 🙂